I’ve laid hosannahs at the feet (to mix metaphors) of Canadian rocker Matt Murphy before. He’s a terrific musician and songwriter. But did you know he’s also a hell of a soccer player? (A hat trick!)

We could have used him during our recent Nieman Fellows Take On The World Soccer Tour, in which a ragtag group of fellows and their spouses challenged various other area folks to a series of matches. Some facts you should know:

— There are 30 fellows, and maybe 20 spouses. Roughly equal number of men and women. We’re all “mid-career journalists,” which for most fellows means they’re, oh, 38 to 50. (I’m one of the youngsters at 31.)

— Being journalists, we mostly sit in front of computers all day. Also — and I overgeneralize here, but only to a point — we have no athletic skills.

— Half of us are Americans, which means we, in our hearts, consider soccer a plague and an abomination.

For reasons that have not yet been explained to me, for our first match we chose to challenge…the Sloan School of Management, MIT’s business school. A business school which currently enrolls 1,110 students, average age 28. Thirty percent of whom — that is, over 300 students — are “international students,” by which I mean “Pele.” Their team had uniforms, with uniform numbers. They were all 26-year-old Latin Adonises, setting up plays by yelling out directions in Portuguese.

You may be surprised to learn we did not, in fact, win.

26 September 2007

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